My Thoughts !

Even after working with Java for all these years, I'm still a great fan of the "Expert Friendly" programming language - C++. Look what the creator of the language has to say about the quality of software.

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The Hindu is a decent daily that contains only the news that you would want. Unlike 'Times of India', there won't be any news if John Abraham vomited in a party or if Briney didn't wear her underwear during her flight travel. When I went to Chennai last weekend, there was a news item in Hindu about a local thief. I was surprised and pulled up some news from of the "unofficial sources" (My classmates' girl friend's dog's hair dresser's second wife's distant cousin). Here are the details.

This guy, lets name him x for now, has started this technique almost an year back. Within few months he has done so many thefts using the same technique. He is bold enough to leave his finger prints. The Police have no match for those prints in their database, so he is new to them. Once it went to a level, where every tuesday night, he would be at work. The police stepped up the night patrol. Once when the police patrol was 4 streets away and he was successful in escaping from the scene after opening a bureau.

The official count of the number of police people deployed on this case stands at 75, but my source claims that it would be somewhere above 350. Everynight they had patroling in many areas. If anyone found to be a suspect, they would take his fingerprints and demand him to show some id. The next morning the fingerprints will be compared with our great x's fingerprints. Still no use. But after all this, our man was silent for 2 months and then he strikes last friday.

So what is his technique? Check what The Hindu says:

Chennai News : `Bureau-puller' is at it again

Somebody said that it was a James Bond movie. I could have done so many things for that money that I spent at Mayajaal for this stupid movie. Sigh :-(

Tonight I'm going to watch a real bond movie in Star Movies. The Golden Eye.

One of my friend happened to read the following comment in the code:

/*
The newline before the title parameter below fixes xxxx-yyyy. I have absolutely no idea HOW it fixes xxxx-yyyy, but the simple fact that it does fix the problem indicates that I could spend my whole life trying to work out why and be none the wiser.
I suggest you don't think too hard about it either, and instead contemplate the many joys that can be found in life - the sunlight reflecting off Sydney Harbour; walking through the Blue Mountains on a dew-laden Autumn morning; the love of a beautiful woman - this should in some way distract you from the insane ugliness of the code I am about to check in.
Oh, and whatever you do, don't remove the damn newline.
*/

When I wrote my "story", Spree asked me, where I got the idea of register marriage from. Well, it was from none other than from Spree herself! Although she didn't opt for it, it was a thought initiated by her.

After several years of trouble, she finally gave me the good news of her engagement. I'm very happy tonight. I'm supposed to keep it as a secret, so I'm not going to blog about this ;-)

When ever I see Anne Geddes's photos, I thought no big deal. Its just some nice photos of kids, whats special about it. I've to change my mind when I tried taking photos of my sister's 2 yr old kid. My God. Just for this one photo, I was struggling like for 15 mins. After 4/5 wasted snaps, finally managed to get one. Now I understand how much effort would Anne Geddes need to shoot those photos!

From Misc

Officially Weblogic is supported on Suse and RedHat only. Not on Ubuntu. But installing it on Ubuntu (Edgy) was smooth. Just downloaded the Weblogic Server 9.2 Redhat x86 installer and executed it. Installation went fine without any problem. After installing I was searching for the menu item for the config wizard. Its not added. So have to manually add it. Same for the menu item for starting generated domain servers. Otherwise the I thought its going to be a painful experience, but overall it was smooth!

Finally I developed the roll. Here are the photos of the beast.

From Diwali Trip

From Diwali Trip

Free and Open Source Java

Finally Sun has open sourced Java. For a Java developer like me, it means nothing. If they concentrate on the licensing and redistribution of the JRE, it would be great for me and the software houses as well. There is no point in creating Desktop applications in Java if there is no assurance that a Java Runtime will be available in the user's machine and even worse that you can't ship Sun's JRE due to a hell lot of license restrictions. This made vendors like IBM and BEA to have their own JRE implementation, but then they are not into desktop application developement. So the future of Java Desktop applications lies on the licensing policy of the JRE and may be tie ups with hardware vendors like Dell & HP for pre-installing Java on the PCs they sell (IBM already bundles their JRE with IBM machines)

I don't write about my employers on this blog. But this is a small exception. Happened to come across a recent news article about my current employer, so here is the link(Sonoa Secures Round B). And regarding the product that we are working on, it is a ... Hey, wait. I need to keep my mouth shut on that :-)

"ஒரு கல்லூரியின் கதை" படத்துல ரெண்டு மூணு பாட்டு நல்லா இருக்கும். எப்பவாச்சும் முனுமுனுத்துட்டு இருப்பேன். படம் பார்த்தது இல்ல. சமீபத்துல எதோ டீவீல போட்டாங்க. அம்மணி கூட உக்காந்து பார்த்துட்டு இருந்தேன். கதை என்னமோ கொஞ்சம் வித்தியாசமாத்தான் போச்சு. நடுவுல ஒரு இடத்துல, மனசுல காதல் இருக்கா இல்லையான்னு தெரிஞ்சுக்க, ஹீரோயின் சத்தமே வராம உதட்ட மட்டும் அசைச்சு கூப்பிடுவாங்களாம், கூப்பிட்ட ஒடனே ரொம்ப தூரத்துல இருக்கற ஹீரோவும் கரெக்டா திரும்பி பார்ப்பாரு. எங்க அம்மணி: "நீயும் தான் இருக்கியே. லேப்டாப்ல எதயாச்சும் நோண்டிகிட்டு இருந்தா, அடுத்த ரூம்ல இருந்து காட்டு கத்து கத்துனாலும் காது கேக்காது. ஹூம். அதுக்கெல்லாம் மனசுல சுத்தமான காதல் வரணும்."

யப்பா டைரக்டருங்களா, உங்களோட கற்பனை வளத்தை பாராட்டுறேன், ஆனா இதெல்லாம் கொஞ்சம் ஓவரு.

I know that I'm the only user in my system and no one else will have access to it. I don't see a point to have a login screen. With Windows, I know we can set to auto login using a userid. I was searching for similar thing in Ubuntu. Found one :-)

Go to terminal and type "sudo gdmsetup". You will get login window preferences. Select Security tab; check "Enable automatic Login" and select the user. You are done! Simple ha? But why there is no shortcut in the Preferences/Administration/Applications menu?

Related links:
Ubuntu Titbits
Eclipse in Ubuntu
Putty in Ubuntu
Screen resolution got struck in Ubuntu
Configure DSL in Ubuntu

I don't know what harm I did to Google. Its been targeting my blog for weird search terms. For the past one week, its sarees color. Check these search terms with Google:

sari color of 2006

orange color sarees

blue and purple shaded sarees

And another thing I don't understand is, why would anyone search in Google for a colorful saree? Shouldn't they go to The Chennai Silks/Pothy's/Nalli? hmmm. Gals!

[Update:15,Nov,2006]

After a week, I thought that saree stuff is over. And then someone landed in this blog for this query: "What color saree suits a dark woman". LOL!